Are you thinking of having any kind of data archive shipped with the Lantern?

Yeah. I think it was even mentioned somewhere. Or maybe not. What will be ‘core’ is actually still being debated. Not just what’s in it, but also how we arrive at it. Lantern will probably have a manageable portion of it to boot. Wikipedia for Schools may just be small enough to fit.

Lantern is poorly described in the website. This should simply be fixed.
Not knowing the exact specs of the device is a poor excuse for the
lack of clarity on this.

As of Nov 30, 2014, the highest capacity SD card I can easily find on the web
is 256GB. It costs $97, quantity 1.
look up PNY-Elite-Performance-256GB on amazon.

If we stick with spending $100 for hard drives,
3Tbytes costs $100
Look up hard drives at Microcenter.

If we are designing for a year from now (Nov 2015) , we expect prices to fall, and we’ll be ordering in
quantity. On the other hand, you want reliability so the absolute max capacity
isn’t the best. But let’s estimate we’ll be able to get double those
capacities for $100, so that’s 512Gbytes sd (maybe use 2 cards!) or
6Tbytes of magnetic hard disk, (SSD disk costs about the same as
SD memory).

Wikipedia offers free copies of all available content to interested users. These databases can be used for mirroring, personal use, informal backups, offline use or database queries (such as for Wikipedia:Maintenance). All text content is multi-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Images and other files are available under different terms, as detailed on their description pages. For our advice about comply...

We can uncompress on the fly.
SD is more expensive per byte but has many advantages:

lower power so less solar panel expense to support it

more reliable as no moving parts

much faster so can serve more people quicker with a given processor.

generates less heat so keeps other parts cooler and thus more reliable,
and necessitating less fan so again less expense and area for solar panels.

and Wikipedia takes up only 2% of it, so let’s go with the SD memory.
Note that when a Lantern is shipped, it can be pre-loaded with Wikipedia, etc.
so the satellite to Lantern data transmission only needs to be the updates.
For any large, relatively persistent body of knowledge, updates per month
will be a tiny fraction of the total knowledge size, probably less than 1% per month.

The entire cost of the lanterns is about $99 as I understand it, with a normal sale price of $149. So there certainly won’t be budget available for $100 SD cards.

Branded 8Gig SD cards are available for about $5, probably less in bulk.

You also have to take into account product R&D and the actual service cost for the lifetime of the device. Realistically, the physical cost (the “bag of parts”) needs to come under $30.

Personally (as a Lantern backer), I’m not very concerned about the amount of pre-installed storage. I am more concerned about having the ability to upgrade the pre-installed storage - hopefully by just swapping a Mini SD card - instead of manually connecting an external hard drive or something like that.

USB storage will be an alternative alongside micro SD for storage will it not? I think it’s convenient to have more than one option to store the library. Of course I know this is already in the FAQ and product description.

I know as far as transmission of data, isn’t a company by the name of GoTenna using a mobile service that has a 50 mile radius for texting? Well, up to fifty miles give or take at line of sight.

Wouldn’t Outernet be able to utilize a similar technology for a possible “upstream” form of communication? Just a thought about possible technologies that are being used. Not so regulated.

Funding/feature creep is definitely an issue. But let’s just say that we had infinite funding. Even in that case, we would not want to include bi-directional communications over VHF into the basic Lantern because then the device turns into an intentional radiator (transmitter). Sure, it already is with it’s wifi module, but wifi is universally unlicensed. Communications over VHF is not unlicensed everywhere, so that means that could not be exported into certain places.

All of that being said, VHF communications will very likely become an add-on feature some day that takes shape in the form of an attachable module.